Was it not a short while ago right here in the Belmont Club that I was berated by someone for saying that in 1776 the people of the Colonies were far less encumbered by the King’s bureaucracy than they are today by our elected government? And did not my berater go on to say that, in effect, the burden of backbreaking toil for the average man America in 1776 constituted a tyranny far worse than that which we endure today?

It is odd indeed that people can equate the physical reality of the universe – that one must earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow – with the necessity of the IRS Form 1040 and it’s endless appendages and the 50,000 new regulations a year issued by the Federal Government. That someone can see this as a “choice” – fill out the forms and shaddup if you want to eat – is absolutely astonishing.

But there is an attitude in Wash DC that they issue the prosperity as if it were a daily ration, that the people shopping at Wal Mart is nothing more than another version of the people in a soup line, that the USA is made up of a bunch of homeless people who all have to be rescued by the Mighty Feds.

In Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff he mentions the attitude behind the Soviet space program. It was to reach out to discover and enslave those other places in the universe that might be living in the aberrant condition of Freedom. That attitude is not limited to Cold War Moscow.